Microbiome testing? What services do you use?

#1

I really want to use some but I’ve heard a lot of skepticism directed towards viome

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#2

My GP recommended American gut project. I never tried though, but plan to do soon.

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#3

Recent articles:

and

#4

Peanut Study: The work was supported by The Peanut Institute- concerning.

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#5

I used this one:

They check your body’s response to glucose, clearing fat from your blood, and your gut micro-biome.

They then recommend foods for you, food combinations, and meal combinations that work best with your specific makeup.

This helped me make changes with the foods I eat, adding fermented foods, and being more careful of carbs. These changes have been lasting, so I continue to be grateful for the info.

The app has continuing data but I don’t use it any more.

On the gut microbiome front, they list everything they find, but specifically note the 15 gut bacteria that most correlate with ill health and the 15 that most correlate with good health. I was horrified to find I had something like 11 of the bad 15 and only 1 of the good 15. Plus they rate foods on a scale of 1 to 100 and I was eating some things that rated like 6, 12, 9. Thus the diet changes that continue to this day.

Finally, I found it refreshing that foods rating 70 or more can be eaten in any quantity. Their proposition is that calorie counting is less important than overall food quality and nutritional value. I’m not insane so I don’t think I can eat 5 lbs of broccoli for 7 weeks straight and be healthy, but I do like that I can stop counting every last almond and I can eat a few apples if that makes me happy.

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#6
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#7

Genova Diagnostics is comprehensive and used in real clinical situations

Thorne has a new one that looks interesting

https://www.gdx.net/products/gi-effects

Gut Health Test with Microbiome Wipe & Reviews | Thorne?

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Akkermansia mucciniphila improves healthspan and lifespan in old female mice
#8

deviation from good bugs to bad is accompanied by an increase in gut leakiness, the spillage of bacterial toxins into the bloodstream, and a cascade of inflammatory effects. This has led to the proposal that this microbiome shift is a “primary cause of aging-associated pathologies and consequent premature death of elderly people.”7318
As profound a change in microbiome composition from early adulthood into old age, there’s an even bigger divergence between the elderly and centenarians.7319 When researchers analyzed centenarian poop, they found a maintenance of short-chain fatty acid production from fiber fermentation.7320 For example, in the Bama County longevity region in the Guangxi province of China, fecal sample analyses found that centenarians were churning out more than twice as much butyrate as those in their eighties or nineties living in the same region. If you recall, butyrate is an anti-inflammatory short-chain fatty acid critical for the maintenance of gut barrier integrity. At the same time, there were significantly fewer products of putrefaction, such as ammonia and uremic toxins like p-cresol. The researchers concluded that an increase of dietary fiber intake may therefore be a path toward longevity.7321 An abundance of fiber feeders also distinguished healthy individuals ninety years and older from unhealthy nonagenarians.7322

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#9

semi-supercentenarians (those aged 105 to 109) found higher levels of health-associated bacteria, such as Bifidobacteria and Akkermansia.7325 In vaginally delivered, breastfed infants, Bifidobacteria make up 90 percent of colon bacteria, but the level may slip down to less than 5 percent in adult colons and even less in the elderly and those with inflammatory bowel disease.7326 But centenarians carry more of the good bacteria in their gut.7327
Bifidobacteria are often used as probiotics, but anti-aging properties may exist in their postbiotics. Bifidobacteria are one of the many bacteria that secrete “exopolysaccharides,” a science-y word for slime.7328 That’s what dental plaque is, the biofilm created by bacteria on our teeth.7329 Exopolysaccharides produced from a strain of Bifidobacteria isolated from centenarian poop were found to have anti-aging properties in mice, reducing the accumulation of age pigment in their brains and boosting the antioxidant capacity of their blood and livers.7330
Akkermansia muciniphila is named after the late Dutch microbiologist Antoon Akkermans7331 and from Latin and Greek for “mucus-lover.” The species is the dominant colonizer of the protective mucus layer in our gut that is secreted by our intestinal lining.7332 Unfortunately, that mucus layer thins as we age,7333 a problem exacerbated by low-fiber diets. When we eat a fiber-depleted diet, we starve our microbial selves. Our famished flora, the microbes in our gut, have to then compete for limited resources and may consume our own mucus barrier as an alternative energy source, thereby undermining our defenses.7334,7335 Mucus erosion from bacterial overgrazing can be switched on and off on a day-to-day basis in mice supplanted with human microbiomes with fiber-rich and fiber-free diets.7336 You can even show it in a petri dish. Researchers successfully re-created layers of human intestinal cells and showed that dripping fiber (from plantains and broccoli) onto the cells at dietary doses could “markedly reduce” the number of E. coli bacteria breaching the barrier.7337 Aside from eating fiber-rich foods, A. muciniphila helps to directly restore the protective layer by stimulating mucus secretion.7338
A. muciniphila is a likely candidate for a healthy aging biomarker,7339 as its abundance is enriched in centenarians7340 and it is particularly scarce in elders suffering from frailty.7341 A comparative study was undertaken of the microbiomes of people in their seventies and eighties experiencing “healthy” versus “non-healthy” aging, defined as the absence or presence of cancer, diabetes, or heart, lung, or brain disease. Akkermansia, the species most associated with healthier aging, were three times more abundant in the fecal samples of the healthy versus non-healthy aging cohort. Among centenarians, a drop in A. muciniphila is one of the microbiome changes that seems to occur about seven months before death, despite no apparent changes in the physical status, food intake, or appetite at the time.7342 To prove a causal role in aging, researchers showed that feeding A. muciniphila to aging-accelerated mice significantly extended their lifespans.7343

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What kind of results are you getting from Akkermansia and for how long?
#10

FOOD ADDITIVES TO AVOID
The ultraprocessed foods that make up the majority of our diet7403 aren’t just deficient in fiber but include additives that have been shown to muck with our microbes. Even something as simple as salt can affect our microbiome. Approximately doubling sodium intake by adding a teaspoon of salt to people’s diets not only increases their blood pressure and boosts pro-inflammatory cells7404 implicated in autoimmune disease7405 but it rapidly depletes the gut of the good bacteria Lactobacillus. Nine out of ten study subjects who started out with Lactobacillus in their gut had it completely wiped out by the added salt within just two weeks.7406

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#11

Hmm I did send a sample last week after a lot of beets and oat fiber. I did get a lot of theane from a4m in January

#12

What’s the source of these posts above @AlexKChen ?

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#13
Relative Abundance Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus
0.1459 Bacteria Firmicutes Bacilli
0.1322 Bacteria Actinobacteria Actinobacteria Actinomycetales Corynebacteriaceae Corynebacterium
0.1148 Bacteria Cyanobacteria Chloroplast Streptophyta
0.0980 Bacteria Actinobacteria Actinobacteria Actinomycetales Corynebacteriaceae Corynebacterium
0.0573 Bacteria Firmicutes Bacilli Bacillales Bacillaceae Bacillus
0.0454 Bacteria Actinobacteria Actinobacteria Actinomycetales Propionibacteriaceae Propionibacterium
0.0367 Bacteria Proteobacteria Gammaproteobacteria Pseudomonadales Pseudomonadaceae Pseudomonas
0.0288 Bacteria Firmicutes Clostridia Clostridiales [Tissierellaceae] Finegoldia
0.0277 Bacteria Firmicutes Bacilli Bacillales Bacillaceae Bacillus
0.0273 Bacteria Actinobacteria Actinobacteria Actinomycetales Corynebacteriaceae Corynebacterium
0.0227 Bacteria Actinobacteria Actinobacteria Actinomycetales Corynebacteriaceae Corynebacterium
0.0195 Bacteria Cyanobacteria Chloroplast Streptophyta
0.0191 Bacteria Bacteroidetes Bacteroidia Bacteroidales Prevotellaceae Prevotella
0.0181 Bacteria Firmicutes Bacilli Lactobacillales Streptococcaceae Streptococcus
0.0099 Bacteria Firmicutes Clostridia Clostridiales [Tissierellaceae] Anaerococcus
0.0092 Bacteria Proteobacteria Gammaproteobacteria Pseudomonadales Pseudomonadaceae Pseudomonas
0.0087 Bacteria Cyanobacteria Chloroplast Streptophyta
0.0081 Bacteria Actinobacteria Actinobacteria Actinomycetales Corynebacteriaceae Corynebacterium
0.0071 Bacteria Proteobacteria Alphaproteobacteria Sphingomonadales Sphingomonadaceae
0.0066 Bacteria Bacteroidetes Flavobacteriia Flavobacteriales [Weeksellaceae] Chryseobacterium
0.0061 Bacteria Firmicutes Clostridia Clostridiales [Tissierellaceae] Anaerococcus
0.0055 Bacteria Actinobacteria Actinobacteria Actinomycetales Actinomycetaceae Actinomyces
0.0048 Bacteria Cyanobacteria Chloroplast Streptophyta
0.0044 Bacteria Actinobacteria Actinobacteria Actinomycetales Actinomycetaceae Actinomyces
0.0044 Bacteria Proteobacteria Gammaproteobacteria Pseudomonadales Moraxellaceae Acinetobacter

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